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Wednesday 19 | 12:57:PM
In this day and age, videos are scrubbed from the net so fast that it's becoming increasingly necessary to download/save them.
Unfortunately with most large scale sites, it's not as simple as just finding an mp4 link and hitting CTRL+S to save it.
In this thread, I'll share a few personal tricks and tools I use to download videos and music from various sources around the internet.
The big sites
Ever use youtube-dl before?
Well these days, there's a more efficient and active fork called YT-DLP which you can grab here: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.
This will cover most mainstream social media sites including but not limited to, youtube, twitter, tiktok, bitchute, vimeo.
Usage:
Firstly, I suggest reading through YT-DLP's documentation for options that suit your preferences.
Basic usage:
This will download a video in it's original format.
$ yt-dlp 'videourl'
My preferred usage:
This will attempt to download the video in the best quality offered if available, and merge the final output into an mp4 file.
(Demonstrating with a random tiktok link)
$ yt-dlp --format "bestvideo+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestvideo+bestaudio/best" --merge-output-format mp4 --output testvid.%(ext)s 'https://www.tiktok.com/@nastyatyman/video/7071925639011503361?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1'
.mp4 and m3u8/.ts
Moving on, what about sites that yt-dlp doesn't cover?
Most sites delivering content themselves today deliver them via raw mp4 or .m3u8/.ts stream.
All we need is browser devtools and ffmpeg which you can grab here: https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html
In this example, I'll be using a random CNN video.
First step, find the m3u8 steam master url in devtools:
Once you have the url, just paste it into ffmpeg as shown below.
My preferred usage:
$ ffmpeg -i 'https://clips-media-lln.warnermediacdn.com/cnn/clips/2022-03/714523-b746d3ba589a40489a9ecb011d1f3612/ts/media-1/stream.m3u8' -codec copy desiredfilename.mp4
voila.
Wrapping up
I wrote a crappy lil wrapper that I personally use for mp3 and mp4 conversion with thumbnail embedding, so I'll leave it here if anyone finds use in it.
Pastebin link: https://pastebin.com/2YvdDTsY
Hopefully this helps you in this digital age of information.
If you have anything to add to this post, feel free to leave a reply and I'll be sure to add edit it in, cheers!
Unfortunately with most large scale sites, it's not as simple as just finding an mp4 link and hitting CTRL+S to save it.
In this thread, I'll share a few personal tricks and tools I use to download videos and music from various sources around the internet.
The big sites
Ever use youtube-dl before?
Well these days, there's a more efficient and active fork called YT-DLP which you can grab here: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.
This will cover most mainstream social media sites including but not limited to, youtube, twitter, tiktok, bitchute, vimeo.
Usage:
Firstly, I suggest reading through YT-DLP's documentation for options that suit your preferences.
Basic usage:
This will download a video in it's original format.
$ yt-dlp 'videourl'
My preferred usage:
This will attempt to download the video in the best quality offered if available, and merge the final output into an mp4 file.
(Demonstrating with a random tiktok link)
$ yt-dlp --format "bestvideo+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestvideo+bestaudio/best" --merge-output-format mp4 --output testvid.%(ext)s 'https://www.tiktok.com/@nastyatyman/video/7071925639011503361?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1'
.mp4 and m3u8/.ts
Moving on, what about sites that yt-dlp doesn't cover?
Most sites delivering content themselves today deliver them via raw mp4 or .m3u8/.ts stream.
All we need is browser devtools and ffmpeg which you can grab here: https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html
In this example, I'll be using a random CNN video.
First step, find the m3u8 steam master url in devtools:
Once you have the url, just paste it into ffmpeg as shown below.
My preferred usage:
$ ffmpeg -i 'https://clips-media-lln.warnermediacdn.com/cnn/clips/2022-03/714523-b746d3ba589a40489a9ecb011d1f3612/ts/media-1/stream.m3u8' -codec copy desiredfilename.mp4
voila.
Wrapping up
I wrote a crappy lil wrapper that I personally use for mp3 and mp4 conversion with thumbnail embedding, so I'll leave it here if anyone finds use in it.
Pastebin link: https://pastebin.com/2YvdDTsY
Hopefully this helps you in this digital age of information.
If you have anything to add to this post, feel free to leave a reply and I'll be sure to add edit it in, cheers!